Devices with digital video recording capability are readily available and easily affordable. In fact, multimedia technologies have advanced to the point where video recording capabilities are commonly included as part of electronic devices such as digital cameras, cell phones and personal digital assistants for example. Alongside the popularity and ease of capturing video content, there are now many options for sharing and consuming captured content. For example, it is straightforward to distribute video content from a computer onto social media websites for example, and more and more people are uploading and sharing video content in this and similar ways.
This situation creates issues relating to data management, such as database optimization for example. It is inefficient to store multiple copies of the same video in a database as it creates needless infrastructure expenses and complicates search and retrieval algorithms. Another issue relates to copyright infringement. There are ways to copy commercial content and redistribute it over the Internet for example. This can result in loss of revenue for a business, and it is typically not feasible to manually sift through hours of videos to determine if an illegal copy has been made or distributed.